Advanced equipment for ultra fast monitoring
The packaging industry involves extremely fast processes, special technical demands for coatings, increased material and energy consumption, as well as the need for repeatability, high-quality products and cost reduction. Challenged by these issues, the TRANSMACH project focused on developing a transparent films vacuum coatings machine with integrated in-line monitoring and control. This intelligent approach includes an ultra-fast unit for process monitoring and a transparent coating properties' screening technique for demonstrating Large Area Vacuum (LAV) machinery with in-line control. Part of the project work was the development of a novel Ultra Fast Multi-Wavelength Ellipsometric (UFMWE) unit capable of monitoring fast processes. The UFMWE unit can meet the strict requirements of in-line monitoring and can control very fast vacuum web coating processes. One of the key demands is a high data acquisition speed for real-time process monitoring, and therefore several novelties were involved in the unit's design. These novelties include an advanced monochromator FUV200:UT 300, a 150 Watts Xenon light source and an ultra-fast acquisition board combined with a hybrid multi-channel detector. Specifications include a total data acquisition time of less than 100ms over a 32 wavelength range with a spectral range of 190-830nm. Special attention was paid to the safety of the unit by including a Nitrogen purge system for ozone evacuation. Additionally, a time counter was also incorporated in the block source for extending the lifetime of the light source when operating in the far UV range. Moreover, an inserted microshutter inhibits external perturbations to affect the accuracy of measurements. The unit also includes a project specific spectrograph and an integrated spectroscopic detector that is based on the use of the CAUTH40 spectrograph and a linear CCD detector (2048 pixels). Ultrafast acquisition boards allow communication of the unit with sensors for acquisition, modelling, local database support, data management and statistics. The prototype unit and software is offered for various sorts of collaboration.
